The impression I got was that they didn't even attempt to satisfy gamers who are into that sort of thing. They set out to create an action-RPG built around a specific character. In that, IMO, they succeeded rather well — the biggest problem was with the difficulty levels. As in, at anything less than Hard, combat became a mechanical matter of looking for the flaming sword icon and then clicking (well, almost). I don't think it's quite fair to fault them for that, any more than faulting, say, Star Wars: A New Hope for not attempting to cater to people who want the psychological depth, complex cinematography, and refined ideas of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I don't actually fault them for anything, as I don't know their motives.
I liked SW:ANH as a child, but I would probably have issues with it if it was released today. But I wouldn't fault Lucas as such, except to say that his movies are crap in my opinion - assuming it'd be like his new trilogy.
I despise 2001, so there
I'm just saying it didn't work for me - and I naturally assume that when you fill a game with combat, your intention is that such activity should be entertaining and even somewhat challenging. If that was not their intention, then naturally it could be just as it should.
As for the Hard difficulty thing, that may well be - but if that's the case, they should probably have given different names - such as "casual" or "hardcore" or something along those lines, because "normal" indicates (to me, anyway) the way the game was meant to be played. It's kinda like the developers vision, though I'm well aware most developers today skew balance towards the easier side - but they can't very well expect us to guess their intentions.
As you say — I liked all of these well enough, even the inventory — compared to NWN 1 and 2, for example, it worked very well for me.
I think the NWN1 UI is excellent, and certainly MUCH superior to The Witcher in pretty much every way. Then again, I know it received a lot of criticism, but I never understood that. They were extremely generous with hotbars and everything was smooth - and the inventory was very large and in my opinion worked really, really well.
NWN2 was slow and cumbersome, and I think the icons they used were downright awful. Maybe if they spent less time changing things that didn't need to be changed, and more time actually polishing content - the game would have been more fulfilling overall.
However, to each his own